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Dear Editors,

A sure sign of spring in Northern Wisconsin is Xcell Energy cutting off power to poor people and raising their rates. This happens every spring, but the number of people cut off and rise in the rates is much greater this year because the winter was so cold and the wages so low.

This is a spring rite because the progressives passed a reform of capitalism to stop the electrical power company from cutting power in the winter because too many people were dying from the lack of heat and light in the cold, dark months of winter. This hit hardest the children and the elderly. Now with the reform the heat and light can't be turned off until spring.

Xcell Energy's average bill is up about 30 percent. It's a global energy company owned by rich German, English and some American stockholders. It takes the energy from flowing rivers such as the Chippewa of Northern Wisconsin and sells it back to them.

I was a small child when in the 1920s they built a dam on the Chippewa River at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The Minnesota/Wisconsin Light and Power Company built the dam. This company got the state of Wisconsin to buy up the farmer's land to make a very large artificial lake to store water. The farmers did not want to sell their good farms but were forced to by the guns and police of the state doing the work for the company.

Now I live near the lake named after the Minnesota/Wisconsin Light and Power Company, Lake Wissota. This company, using these free resources, made money and expanded to become the Northern States Light and Power Company and now has expanded globally to become Xcell Energy with German and English rich investors.

This theft has gone on for almost 100 years now. How much longer will it go on? I believe not much longer. The people are waking up to the theft of their resources by the big global companies and they have learned that these companies and capitalism itself cannot be reformed but must be destroyed.

-Joe Johnson

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Dear Editors,

Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg said that a United Capitalist State of Europe was impossible and they were correct. All that was produced was a house of cards that is now collapsing. The recent vote was a vote of no confidence in the European Union. It indicated the death of the short life of the EU and the Euro.

It is now that the U.S. is holding up the dead tree of the EU. The people of the U.S. are getting extremely tired of it.

Land, peace and bread were the banners of the Russian Revolution and they will be the banners of the socialist United States of Europe and the United States of America.

The $15-an-hour movement will become a world movement and a major area of world struggle.